Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

The integrated core curriculum at the Tuck School provides coverage of key functional areas and disciplines: statistics and decision science, corporate finance and capital markets, managerial and global economics, marketing, organizational behavior and personal leadership, strategy, communications, and operations. Students who have extensive previous background in a particular discipline may exempt out of a course and take an elective in its place, though opting out of a core course is often discourage because it takes you away from your assigned cohort.

With the core curriculum as a foundation and more than 80 electives to choose from, students can customize their education to meet individual needs and interests. Elective offerings allow students to focus on specific areas of study within the context of the broad perspective and cross-functional knowledge required in top management positions. In addition to the core and elective courses, students are required to satisfy an ethics and social responsibility course requirement at some point during their two years.

Latest Up-To-Date MBA Rankings:

Poets&Quants (2013): 8

BusinessWeek (2012): 12

U.S. News & World Report (2014): 9

Forbes (2013): 6

Financial Times (2013): 10

The Economist (2013): 2 (Global), 2 (U.S.)

Ranking Analysis:

Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business maintained its number eighth ranking on Poets&Quants’ 2012 composite list, despite a lot of up-and-down movement in the world’s five most influential MBA rankings. On the plus side, Tuck gained two places in this year’s Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s survey, finishing at a rank of 12th among U.S. schools, up from 14th two years earlier. BusinessWeek, which largely measures schools on the basis of graduate and corporate recruiter satisfaction, is still ranking the school below its true standing. But at least the improvement is moving in the right direction. Tuck also did better in The Financial Times’ ranking in 2012, also gaining two spots to finish ninth in the U.S., up from 11th in 2011.

On the negative side, however, the school slipped two places in U.S. News & World Report’s 2012 ranking to seventh from ninth a year earlier. And Tuck also lost its No. 1 ranking in The Economist this year to the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Still, Tuck only fell to second place, its best showing in any major ranking of business school MBA programs. When you add up all the forward-and-backward movement, the school’s overall standing in the P&Q survey was exactly the same as it was in 2011.

Worth mentioning here, however, is why Tuck was able to move up two places in the BusinessWeek survey. The school had a very strong showing on the graduate satisfaction portion of the BW ranking, moving up ten places to finish fourth in graduate satisfaction, from 14th in 2010. If those scores weren’t so closely clustered together, Tuck would have jumped several more spots upward. The school also did better on the corporate recruiter section of the BW poll, moving up to a respectable 11th place finish, from 15th in 2010. For a small school outside a major urban center, this is a very good showing because there is a natural bias in the BusinessWeek methodology that impacts elite schools with small graduating classes that tend to draw fewer corporate recruiters to campus than a Harvard, Wharton, Chicago or Northwestern.

Ask any Tuckie if they would trade that intimacy for a higher ranking and they would laugh. As one Class of 2012 told BusinessWeek on its satisfaction survey, “Tuck is unique because it truly has a culture and community that nurtures and helps develop the entire student. I know that I can walk into the office of any of the deans without an appointment and he or she will know my name and will take the time to meet with me as soon as possible. The professors go the extra mile to get to know their students. I regularly have informal conversations with professors from the first year in the hallways at Tuck, I have traveled to India with my favorite professor from the core, and I’ve had dinner parties at the homes of professors where the conversation goes until 1am. The students here put each other first, and the size of our program allows our students to truly appreciate the true diversity of our class.”

B-School Smack Down Reports:

Tuck vs. Harvard Business School

Tuck vs. Stanford Graduate School of Business

Tuck vs. Columbia Business School

Top Feeder Colleges & Companies to Tuck:

Top Feeder Colleges to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

Top Feeder Companies to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

Interview with Admissions Director:

A Conversation with Dawna Clarke (video)

Common Mistakes Tuck Applicants Make (video)

MBA Program Consideration Set:

Stretch Schools: HarvardStanford

Match Schools: ChicagoWhartonNorthwestern’s Kellogg School, MIT SloanBerkeley

Safety Schools: DukeVirginia, New York, Michigan, Yale, Cornell

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